Review Of Flux Elixir True Peak Limiter Plug-In

Flux have been busy recently and have released a new true peak limiter Elixir aimed at the audio post production market for those producing content to one of the new loudness specs like the EBU R128. But this isn’t a loudness management plug-in, it is designed to manage the true peak levels to keep them within the broadcaster’s delivery spec whilst being as transparent as possible and not unduly adding to the loudness. I think this is the first product of its type and so I wanted to see if Flux had managed to meet these expectations.

I set up a session with a range of different programme types to see how it would perform and also followed it with a loudness meter to see if it changed the loudness too much.

I found it was very good with very few side effects even when working it hard. It is very simple to use with the main Threshold control often the only one I would need to set. Once I had got to grips with the basics I studied the manual because there was a couple of controls I didn’t expect to see on a limiter.

The first is Ch. Link. Normally you expect to have a Link on/off button but Elixir has a slider so you can vary the amount of linkage. The other control I wasn’t expecting was a slider labeled Stages. On studying the manual this control helps to make Elixir even more transparent. This is what the manual says…

Number of stages (passes or steps) used by the algorithm. Because the algorithm adapt itself to the audio material, doing multi stages allow for the processing to be even more precise and provide an even more natural sounding result. For e.g. if the threshold is set to -3 dB and Stages set to 3: First stage will limit at -1dB, Second stage will limit at -2dB and third will limit at -3dB with analyzing done for each stages!

I have to say the difference is stunning, I love this Stages option and I can see me using Elixir in 5 Stage mode a lot, especially on more demanding content. It works very quickly, so for normal amounts of limiting it hardly had any affect on the overall loudness of the programme. I can see Elixir becoming my ‘go to’ broadcast mastering limiter especially when Flux has released it in AAX DSP format.

Conclusion

It is an excellent mastering limiter and works really well whether it is to manage true peaks in a loudness workflow or a more conventional limiter to stop anything going beyond PPM6 and the price is stunning.